http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/opinion/12WED3.html
Threats to the Forest A Senate-House conference has now approved an omnibus appropriations bill loaded with destructive anti-environmental riders. Since President Bush has no intention of vetoing the bill � as President Clinton did in 1995 when presented with a similarly offensive measure � the House should remand it to the committee for repairs. The worst of the amendments would open up much of Alaska's Tongass and Chugach forests for logging. One would exempt about 14 million acres in the two forests from protections granted by a Clinton-era rule, developed over three years and since upheld by the courts, prohibiting commercial development in roadless and largely unlogged areas of the national forest system. A second would resurrect and insulate from future legal challenge a faulty 1997 management plan for the Tongass, effectively rescinding a more protective plan approved in 1999. A third provision would shield from public appeals and judicial review what is expected to be an unfavorable administration decision regarding wilderness protection for parts of the Tongass. Potentially the most troubling amendment, involving not just Alaska but the entire forest system, would broaden the reach of the so-called forest stewardship program. Under this program, now in the pilot stage, timber companies are allowed to harvest trees as payment in kind for other projects like road clearing or the thinning of underbrush to prevent forest fires. Conservationists fear that open-ended, broadly drawn stewardship contracts will give the loggers license to cut huge tracts that would otherwise be spared. As threatening as these provisions are to the health of the forests, they are no less distasteful for their cavalier disregard of due process. In each case they either summarily overrule existing law or, even more ominously, seek to narrow or suspend rights of appeal and judicial review that Americans have long enjoyed under established environmental law. Democrats and Republican moderates in the House led by Sherwood Boehlert of New York are organizing a counterattack. We wish them well. Eight years ago this same group helped Bill Clinton turn back a similar onslaught engineered by Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America crowd. Their timely intervention is equally important now. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
